POLITICAL UNIONS

THE CREIGHTON LECTURE

DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
NOVEMBER 8,1911

BY

HERBERT A. L. FISHER

Price One Shilling net

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1911

POLITICAL UNIONS

THE CREIGHTON LECTURE

DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
NOVEMBER 8, 1911

BY

HERBERT A. L. FISHER

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1911

HENRY FROWDE

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK

TORONTO AND MELBOURNE

POLITICAL UNIONS

THREE years ago I was honoured by an invitation to
deliver some historical lectures in South Africa. The
country still bore upon its face the scars and memorials
of the recent war. There were the grim ugly block-
houses guarding the railroad, the little crosses of white
stonet fresh and glistening in the bright African air,
and sprinkled so thickly in the desolate spaces between
Estcourt and the Tugela that the train seemed to wind
through a continuous cemetery. The rents made by the
Boer guns in the Post Office and Hotel at Ladysmith
were still gaping ; the broken wire was still drawn in
front of the lon^ straight trench where the Highland
Brigade met with its disaster under the round hills of
Magersfontein. In the most lonely and secluded regions,
on air- washed kopjes, commanding leagues of waving
and utterly solitary veld and with no visible sign of man
to disturb the enchanting tranquillity of the scene, you
would suddenly kick against a Mauser bullet or the
littered fragments of shrapnel mingling with the rugged
grey rocks and the short stiff sun-browned grass. And
in the haunts of men, behind all the hopeful bustle and
good humour of Colonial life, you were never very far
from the background of strife, tragedy, and adventure.
The human race would indeed be hardly human if, after
such a struggle, there were no bitter drop in the cup of
memory. In one Dutch village, where the death-roll
among the children had been very heavy through a com
centration camp, I spoke under a bust of President

235602

PARLIAMENT

Kruger to an audience dressed in mourning, and in
a room gloomily hung with crape.

The war had already ceased to be the main topic of
conversation. In South Africa events move quickly, and
what with repatriation and Chinese labour, a Zulu rising
in Natal, and a Constitutional revolution in the two
Boer States, quite apart from grave questions of railway
and tariff policy, there had been an ample supply of new
controversy and distraction. The English Africander,
like most Englishmen who seek their fortune in new
lands, is of a sanguine mould ; and for one conversation
which turned upon the past there would be twenty dis-
cussions about the future of the country. The Kaffir
Circus might boom or slump ; everybody was agreed
that South Africa would some day become a great and
flourishing nation.

The grant of responsible government to the Transvaal
had resulted in a Dutch victory at the polls and had put
General Botha into office at the head of a Het Volk
ministry. The scene in the Parliament House at Pretoria
was such as could be enacted nowhere save in the free
atmosphere of the British Empire. Looking down from
the gallery the visitor beheld the rival protagonists of
the Civil War divided by a narrow strip of green carpet
and exchanging the established courtesies of parliamen-
tary debate. The Speaker was a Boer general and
a stalwart lion-hunter whose Anglophobia had been
instantly dispersed by the responsibilities of office ; his
clerk and professional adviser was an Englishman
excellently versed in our Constitutional forms. The
mace lay upon the table, and old Boer farmers, who
began by suspecting it as a symbol of idolatry, now
marked their exits and entrances by the bow which is
prescribed in the mother of Parliaments. Beneath the

SOUTH AFRICAN UNION 5

gallery an English member of Lord Milner's Civil Ser-
vice would watch the fate of some measure which he had
helped to draft and might be seen from time to time in
consultation with the Boer minister in charge of the Bill.
Party feeling ran high, but not to undue lengths nor to
the exclusion of social intercourse. It was of good
augury that the Cabinet conducted its deliberations in
English; and that in its two leading spirits, General
Botha and General Smuts, it possessed men of charac-
ter, generosity, and intelligence. Taking its beating at the
polls in an admirable spirit, vigilant but never to the point
of unfairness, the English opposition was ready to give its
support to proposals conceived upon broad and progres-
sive lines. Responsible government had at last brought
the leaders of the two white races together in the every-
day communion of parliamentary business and, so far as
a stranger might judge, the experiment promised well.

The Union of South Africa was the common ideal of
the Dutch and English in the Transvaal. Union alone
would avert a tariff war and secure a comprehensive
and intelligent treatment of the many grave social and
•economic questions with which South Africa was con-
fronted. But what shape should union take ? Should
the sovereignty be divided as in America and Canada or
united in a single parliament as in England ? All over
South Africa men were canvassing the comparative
merits of unification and federation. At first the looser
federal form seemed the utmost that was desirable and
the utmost that could be achieved. It was recommended
by the impressive examples of America, Canada, and
Australia, by the vast area of the territory to be governed,
by the strong colonial and local spirit, and by the im-
probability that Cape Colony would abandon or the
other colonies adopt the much-debated system of the

6 CASE FOR UNIFICATION

coloured vote. But a closer examination of South
African problems showed that there were superior
advantages in the unitary state. South Africa is a large
country expensively governed by handfuls of white men.
To four parliaments and four executives ruling a rough
million of whites the federal scheme would necessarily
add a fifth parliament and a fifth executive. Considering
that every colony save the Transvaal showed a deficit
on its budget, and that every newspaper was already
full of the bitter cry of the retrenched civil servant, it
seemed unwise to adopt a plan which could not but
aggravate the financial situation.

Economy therefore was a strong argument in favour
of unification, but it was far from being the strongest.
The essence of federation is that in a federal state
sovereignty is partitioned. Now the leading problems of
South African public life do not without injury admit of
partition. The native problem cannot be partitioned.
The railway problem cannot be partitioned. It is
desirable that with respect both to natives and to
railways there should be a uniform policy throughout
the Union. In a country depending, as South Africa
does, upon coloured labour, the native policy affects
almost every department of life, hours of work, wages,
domestic life, street police, railways, education, and hence
it is impossible in practice to separate the general conduct
of native affairs from a great number of other matters
which do not obviously appear to be connected with it.
In the course of the summer of 1908 the Transvaal
delegates to the Convention determined to support
unification and, realizing that it is always half the battle
to go into committee with resolutions already cut and
dried, hammered out the draft of a complete Constitution.
Never was there a better expenditure of preliminary

THE UNION MOVEMENT 7

labour. The Transvaal plan was in all its main outlines
adopted by the Convention, and the scheme of the Con-
vention has become, almost unchanged, the Constitution
of South Africa.

In view of the numerous difficulties which beset the
path, the racial suspicions, the extreme reluctance of
Natal to place itself under the control of a Dutch majority,
the contrariety of industrial interest between the coast
colonies and the upland, the enfranchisement of the
coloured man at the Cape and the general horror with
which that policy was regarded in all the other South
African communities, the achievement of Union was a
splendid instance of patriotic forbearance. It was made
possible partly by the war and partly by the wise and
courageous grant of self-government four years later.
The autonomous Dutch republics had disappeared, and
General Botha and his men had come back from their
farms to govern a possession of the British Crown. The
desire to emulate the example of the three great Anglo-
Saxon unions, to become a nation, weighty in the scales
and counsels of the world and immune from those ruinous
civil discords which had darkened the history of South
Africa, these were the predominant motives. The country
was deeply stirred. Closer Union Societies sprang up in
every direction and helped, together with an anonymous
work upon the Government of South Africa, to tone
down racial exasperation and to educate political opinion.
It was of immense importance that Generals Botha and
Delarey on the one hand and Sir George Farrar and Sir
Percy Fitzpatrick on the other, the outstanding figures
in the Transvaal, stood for union, for, having through its
line to Delagoa Bay an alternative route to the sea and
consequently the power of inflicting grave economic
damage upon Natal and the Cape, the Transvaal was

8 A SURVEY OF UNIONS

mistress of the situation. It is the habit of the Dutch to
follow their leaders, and with General Botha pledged to
the national policy the victory of union was more than
half assured.

The mere fact that communities, previously disjoined,
have struck some common measure of agreement or
have contrived to find shelter under a common polity
does not necessarily imply that the agreement is wise or
that the shelter will be rainproof. Some political unions
have failed; others have been only half-successful;
others again have been brilliantly and buoyantly pros-
perous. The union of Portugal and Spain formed in 1580
was violently repudiated in 1640 and finally dissolved
after a long and dragging war in 1668. The union of
Belgium and Holland was an affair of fifteen years ; the
conjunction of Norway and Sweden endured uneasily
for ninety-one years and was then peaceably snapped.
Nobody can say that the union of England and Ireland,
however necessary it may have been to frame it in the
circumstances in which it was framed, or whatever evils
may be predicted in certain quarters from its dissolution,
has been a source of tranquil development or harmonious
feeling. On the other hand there is the classical instance
of Scotland, quoted in the Philadelphia convention,
adduced as a crushing precedent for Pitt's solution of
the Irish problem, and recommended for the considera-
tion of the recalcitrant Norwegians by the government
of Stockholm, there is the astonishing conjunction of
three separate races with three separate languages first
into a league of states and then in 1848 into a true
federation among the mountains in Switzerland, there
are the three great Anglo-Saxon federations, there is the
German Empire and the Italian Kingdom.

FORCED UNIONS 9

Now it is obvious on this survey that the cases of
failure have all been cases where the union has been
imposed upon one of the parties from without, either by
force of arms or by international agreement. Portugal
was conquered by Philip II, who taking advantage of
the death of King Sebastian and all his peerage at the
battle of Alcazir-Kebir, sent a veteran army into the
country under the Duke of Alva sufficiently strong to
overcome, in a year of drought, plague, and insufficient
harvests, the half-hearted opposition of the commons,
the students, and the priests. The national opposition
of the Norwegians was similarly crushed by an over-
whelming display of material force. This country of
peasants and fishermen had been transferred from
Denmark to Sweden by the Treaty of Kiel, January 14,
1814, as a reward for the services which Sweden had
rendered to the allies during the Leipzig campaign. The
arrangement, which was signed by England, Sweden,
and Denmark, made no provision for consulting the
Norwegian people. It was assumed that if the monarchy
of Denmark chose to alienate a portion of its dominion
to another power, it was perfectly entitled to do so,
but Norway thought otherwise. It happened that the
governor of the country at this time, Prince Christian
Frederick of Denmark, shared the general indignation
of the Norwegian people. He permitted himself to be
elected king of an independent Norway, and after vain
attempts to conciliate the Powers was driven to defend
his own title and the pride of Norway by force of arms.
The pressure of Europe was not to be resisted.
England blockaded the ports and a month's campaign
on land and sea showed Norway that she was no match
for the Swedes. On August 14, 1815, by the peace of
Moss the Norwegians accepted the Crown of Sweden

B

io FORCED UNIONS

and were accorded a measure of autonomy almost as
great as that which Hanover enjoyed under her personal
union with Great Britain.

The case of Belgium presents some obvious analogies
to that of Norway, in that the political destiny of both
peoples was changed much about the same time in virtue
of international agreements made without their know-
ledge or consent. The Belgians, however, did not fight.
As they had passed from Burgundy to Spain, from Spain
to, Austria, and from Austria to France, so now they
passively submitted to the alien rule of a Dutchman.
Many regretted the solid advantages of the French con-
nexion. Nobody was enthusiastic for the Dutch. But the
country was weary of military quarterings, press censor-
ship, and all the uncomfortable accessories of Napoleonic
warfare, and the Belgians acquiesced in an experiment
which was not without material advantages and which
in any case they were powerless effectually to oppose.

Yet if conquest or the diplomatic compulsion of
external Powers is a grave element of weakness, it is
not necessarily fatal to the formation and maintenance
of a successful union. Hanover and Bavaria fought
Prussia in 1866 and are nevertheless loyal members of
the German Empire. French Canada and Dutch South
Africa are the fruits of conquest, as is the continuance
of the Southern States in the American Federation. It
is, however, pertinent to remark that save in the case of
Hanover and the Southern States of America, the
successful political union has not been the immediate
or necessary consequence of military ascendancy. Con-
quest made union possible, but when union came it was
founded not upon conquest but upon consent.

Secondly it will be noted that in every case where
union has failed, there has been either a linguistic or a

RACE AND LANGUAGE n

racial difference between the members of the artificial
State. A passionate race-sentiment has certainly been
the underlying note, as well as the ennobling feature, of
Irish discontent. Language was at the bottom of the
Belgian revolution of 1830, for the Netherland govern-
ment with sovereign unwisdom insisted on making the
use of Dutch obligatory for admission to public office and
employment. In Norway and Portugal, however, lin-
guistic differences were not deciding or important factors,
partly because the differences themselves were not very
great but mainly because no attempt was made to force
Swedish upon Norway or to extrude the use of Portu-
guese by Castilian. But here again in view of the his-
tory of Switzerland and Canada, it is impossible to affirm
that linguistic differences — even where as in Wales,
South Africa, and Quebec they are jealously preserved —
are fatal or necessarily injurious to a harmonious
national life. Everything depends upon the amount
of external pressure which makes the political union
necessary, and the wisdom with which the conflicting
claims of rival tongues are harmonized within the state.
Geographical distribution is also clearly a factor of the
highest importance. If the Transvaal had been as
preponderantly Dutch as Natal is preponderantly
British, it is doubtful if any power would have brought
the two states together. So too in Canada. Had the
French not been stationed in the middle waters of
the St. Lawrence between two blocks of British settlers,
would they ever have been willing partners in a
Canadian confederation ? If the fates had scattered the
French settlers over the flats of Nova Scotia or upon
the western slopes of the Rockies it would have required
a very strong measure of external compulsion to drive
them into political communion with a people alien

12 THE SCOTTISH UNION

alike in descent, language, and religion. As it is, the
miracle has been accomplished by stern geographical
necessity, assisted by the spirit of British freedom which
has cleverly preserved, as it were in Arctic ice, a medi-
eval society as alien to the temper of revolutionary France
as it is fearful of the contagion of republican America.

Great as is the influence of sentiment in politics, it is
not all-powerful. Men have material appetites, and
communities are swayed, and not without good reason,
by the calculus of material profit and loss. The treaty
for the Scottish Union was, at the time of its divul-
gation, bitterly and almost universally denounced in the
northern kingdom. The Jacobites, who wanted the
Stuarts back upon the throne, were furious at a settle-
ment which involved the acceptance of the Protestant
succession. The Presbyterians viewed with dismay the
prospect of subjection to a prelatical parliament and
a Lutheran king. Lawyers feared the loss of their fees ;
ministers ejectment from their manses; manufacturers
and merchants proclaimed the ruin of trade. All the
rich men would go up to London and settle in England,
and all the money would follow them across the border.
The city of Edinburgh saw its doom written large in
every line of a document which destroyed the Scottish
Parliament and transferred the government from Holy-
rood to Westminster. For three days Glasgow — then
a small country town of thirteen thousand inhabitants,
but afterwards destined by reason of the Union to grow
into one of the largest ports of the world — was in the
power of an anti-Union mob. So fierce and general
was the indignation that but for a peculiarly wet and
inclement winter the forces of the opposition might have
concentrated on the capital and compelled the govern-
ment to withdraw the treaty. Yet in the course of

SPAIN AND PORTUGAL 13

a few generations the feeling of injury was completely
obliterated. So far from the country being ruined by
its connexion with England, it derived from that union
immense material advantages. Poor, backward, and
ignorant Scotland became within a few generations one
of the most prosperous communities in Europe, and
this not only by virtue of her admission to the markets
of India, America, and England but also because the
Union put an end to the political uncertainty and the
religious strife which had so long retarded Scottish
progress.

The very contrary was the case with Portugal and
Ireland. In both these countries union followed a
period of material expansion and prosperity and was
succeeded by years of economic decline. The wide and
resplendent empire of the Portuguese was built up in
the later half of the fifteenth and the earlier half of the
sixteenth century. Then it was that the Portuguese
circumnavigated Africa, colonized Madeira and the
Azores, ranged the coast of Guinea for gold, ivory, and
negroes, planted a factory at Malacca and laid the founda-
tions of an empire in India and Brazil. Then it was
that Camoens found in the romance of Portuguese dis-
covery and conquest the theme for his great patriotic
epic. But the conquest of Portugal by Spain exposed
these far-flung tropical possessions to the enmities
which were assailing the Spanish Empire. The Dutch,
excluded from the Port of Lisbon, sailed round Africa
to capture the spice trade. They took Malacca in 1631,
ousted the Portuguese from Sumatra in 1607, founded
their splendid colony in Java in 1618, and occupied
Formosa in 1635. The English in the reign of James I
won significant victories on the eastern coast of India.
Just as the Dutch, when incorporated in the Napoleonic

14 DECLINE OF PORTUGAL

Empire, were stripped of Java, Ceylon, and the Cape
by the power which held the mastery of the seas, so
was Portugal, through its incorporation in Spain, assailed
in every quarter of the globe by nations more vigorous
than itself. A Portuguese writer in 1624, in a treatise
which anticipates the modern philosophy of sea-power,
urged that the one course capable of arresting the rapid
decline of the Iberian Empire was that the capital should
be transported from Madrid to Lisbon, and that the
total maritime strength of the monarchy should be
employed in the British Channel upon the destruction
of the Dutch and English navies.1 Such bold and
drastic counsels were thrown away upon the Spanish
Court. The kings of Spain treated Lisbon with
studied neglect, and in defiance of the solemn promise
of Philip II the Cortes of Portugal was only once
summoned. The country was taxed without its consent
to support a ruinous war, and not unnaturally attributed
its calamities to the political connexion with its power-
ful neighbour. Living in the age of Richelieu, Olivarez
may be pardoned for believing that national power
depended on administrative centralization, but no policy
was less suited to the conditions of the Iberian penin-
sula ; and Portugal, which might have been preserved to
the Spanish monarchy by home rule or federation, was
driven into revolt by the direct and stringent govern-
ment of a state under which it experienced the ruin of
its trade and the loss of half its empire.

To a very much smaller degree the Irish attitude
towards the Union was affected by the contrast between
the material prosperity of the years immediately preced-
ing the Act and the period of economic depression which
ensued. The Act of Union with Scotland threw open

1 Manoel Severim de Faria, Discursos varios politicos, Evora, 1624.

ECONOMIC CAUSES 15

to the Scottish people the trade with India and the
other English colonies and was therefore a direct and
palpable cause of the prosperity which ensued. No such
benefits could be attributed to the Act of Union with
Ireland in 1800. The trade with America and the Eng-
lish colonies had been opened up to Irish adventure
between 1778 and 1779 ; and in the opinion of Mr. Lecky
the years between 1779 and the rebellion of 1798 were
' probably the most prosperous in Irish history, as the
generation which followed the Union was one of the
most miserable '. No material benefit outweighed the
unpopularity of a measure consummated by cqrruption
and founded upon religious inequality. From the first
it was unfortunately associated with poverty and distress.
It would be folly to urge that economic disappointment
was a serious element in the discontent of either Belgium
or Norway under their respective unions. Both coun-
tries advanced in prosperity, and in the case of Belgium
some part of that advance could be directly attributed to
the activity of the Government and to the opening out of
the Dutch colonies to Belgian trade. Nevertheless, the
case for separation was in both instances supported by
economic arguments or else by arguments based upon
a shifting of economic power after the Union had been
contrived. The Belgians argued that their manufactures
would have made a swifter recovery under a tariff less
obviously designed to suit the seafaring interests of the
Dutch, and the Norwegians appealed to the great ex-
pansion of their commercial navy as a ground for
repudiating a system which appeared to imply that the
oversea trade of the Scandinavian kingdom was a matter
exclusively interesting to the Swedes. The lesson seems
to be that an advance in prosperity will not commend a
union which is otherwise unpopular, and that in some

16 DANGER OF DUALISM

cases it may furnish a direct argument for its destruc-
tion. V

It will be noticed that in every case where union has
been unsuccessful only two communities have been con-
cerned, but in every case (save that of Scotland and
England) where it has been successful the number has
been greater. Is this a mere chance or can any reason
be assigned for it ? At first sight it might seem that the
conflicting interests of two communities must be more
easily adjusted than the rival claims of a larger number.
It would appear, however, that the reverse proposition is
more nearly true. In a union of two powers there can
hardly fail to be a direct feeling of rivalry, and a con-
tinuing suspicion either on the one side or the other
that the balance is not truly held. But in a polity con-
structed out of many states or provinces such a feeling
is greatly diluted. Indeed, the more complex the inter-
play of material, religious, and political interests, the
more easy is it to discover and to maintain a stable
political combination. The danger which came near to
breaking up the American Union was not the larger
number of states of which the Union was composed — that
was a safeguard rather than a danger — but the fact that
beneath this show of multiple interests there was an
underlying dualism upon a vital matter of social and
political principle between the free States of the North
and the slave States of the South. Such a dualism is
always a source of political peril. The question of
slavery cost America a civil war. It is to be hoped that
the contrariety of policy with respect to the native fran-
chise which is embalmed in the text of the South African
Constitution may never give rise to a similar struggle.

The consolidating influence of multiplicity is equally
visible whether we take the case of an old country like

GERMANY AND CANADA 17

Germany or that of a new country like Canada. One of
the principal secrets of German strength lies in .the fact
that political parties in the Empire do not, save with
comparatively trifling exceptions, correspond with state
boundaries. There is no party of the Southern or of
the Western states. Men vote in groups determined
by religious convictign or by any one of the numerous
and delicate shades of political opinion into which the
mind of an intelligent and complex community inevitably
divides itself. If they are Catholics they vote with the
Centre ; if their interest is in land, with the Agrarians.
Radical minds find shelter with the Social Democrats.
In younger communities politics are necessarily of a
more simple character, and for this reason it is the more
difficult for two sharply contrasted bodies of men to live
side by side in harmony. The experiment of uniting
the French and English colonies of Lower and Upper
Canada in a constitutional state broke down hopelessly.
The two races hated each other, or if they did not hate,
were brimful of suspicion. The machine of government
could only be got to work by methods of conciliation
almost as objectionable as the disease which they were
designed to cure. If a hundred pounds was voted to
Scottish dissenters, a similar sum must be squandered
upon French Catholics. The public interest was shame-
fully and continually sacrificed in order that an artificial
semblance of equity might be preserved between two
peoples whose outlook upon politics was almost wholly
obscured by the dominant fact of racial animosity. The
remedy for this state of things was found in a wide
federation. The discordant state was split into the two
provinces of Ontario and Quebec, and these with the
provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were
combined under a federal union. Ever since that date

i8 ORIGIN OF POLITICAL UNIONS

racial opposition has been a slowly diminishing influence
in Canadian politics.

The growth of nationalities in the nineteenth century
has naturally drawn attention to the racial factor in
political life and we may be easily tempted to exaggerate
its importance as an agent in the formation of such
unions as we have been considering. In no quarter of
the globe is racial homogeneity more complete than in
Australia. The colonies of Australia were not only
settled by emigrants from the British Isles, but, partly
owing to geographical situation and partly owing to
avowed policy, the whole continent is singularly free
from non-British elements. Yet Australia was not feder-
ated till 1900, and then only after fifty years of inter-
mittent discussion and debate. Though all the colonies
were British, though society and government was prac-
tically uniform throughout the habitable portions of the
continent, provincial jealousy was sufficiently strong to
defeat the federalists until the German flag was planted
in New Guinea. What community of blood and origin
was unable to effect was accomplished through the fear
of foreign danger.

A study of the causes which produced the American
and Canadian federations leads to a similar conclusion.
A feeling of racial unity and common brotherhood may
help a union when it is once formed but is not the
original spring of unifying activity. John Quincy Adams
said rightly of the Federal Constitution of 1789 that it
was ' extorted from the grinding necessities of a reluctant
people '. There was hardly an American citizen of that
time, who, had some good fairy offered to secure him
against the risks of anarchy and civil war, of bankruptcy
or foreign invasion, would have lifted a finger towards
the construction of a great American nation. The

THE AMERICAN UNION 19

American colonist of those days believed that a small
state was favourable to liberty and that a great state
was hostile to it. He accepted the dogma of the philo-
sophers .that no great expanse of territory could be
governed on the perfect or republican pattern. He
cherished his own state, not because it was powerful but
because it was modest, not because it was imposing but
because it was familiar, as a man cherishes a family
heirloom which it is a point of honour to preserve and
to hand on with its lustre untarnished to those who
should come after. And while he worked for his own
state and schooled his ambitions to its service, he, was
apt to look upon the neighbouring colonies with feelings
of suspicion and jealousy which the joint effort of the
War of Independence had failed materially to weaken.
The American union was not the spontaneous product of
fraternal sentiment, but, like almost all the great achieve-
ments of statesmanship, a pis alter. Nobody relished
it. Nobody would have dreamed of suggesting it had it
not become abundantly clear that the whole country
was drifting into anarchy for lack of a strong central
government. As it was, the famous Convention which
framed the Federal Constitution was not the product
of a declared and open decision of the American people,
but a surprise and the result of a manoeuvre, and the
most belauded constitutional document of modern his-
tory was only ratified after a tremendous electoral con-
test, which, but for the brilliant advocacy of Alexander
Hamilton, would probably have had a different issue.

The origin of the modern nation of Canada bears
similar though less formidable signs of compulsion and
reluctance. The secret of a true federation had been
discovered by the Americans, and Canada's way to union
was made the easier by the flaming beacon of America's

20 CANADIAN FEDERATION

prosperity. Nevertheless, seventy-eight years divide the
Philadelphia Convention from the British North America
Act, an interval intelligible enough when we consider the
rivalries of race and creed, the vast solitudes, and dis-
tances, the meagre and scattered settlements, and the
imperfect consciousness of any general economic benefit
to be obtained through closer union, but illustrative also
of the tenacious spirit of Canadian localism. Of the
general forces which weakened and dissolved that spirit
the most important was the new imagination of space
which came to the Canadians, as it has come to all the
world, through the invention of the railway. Canada is
an example of a nation strung upon a thread of steel and
only made possible by the art of the engineer. But if
science showed that federation was possible, the harsh
logic of politics proved that it was necessary. The
reciprocity treaty with America had expired in 1865 and
was not renewed. The Constitutional deadlock in the
two Canadas had become unendurable and could only be
terminated in one way. And south of the frontier stood
a nation in arms, thrilling with the tremors of a great war
and in its strength, militancy, and union, suddenly con-
ceived as a peril and a warning. If Canada waited longer
for federation she might invite attack from the south or
lose for ever her chance of spreading to the Pacific.
The arguments were as strong as political arguments can
be, but it was with the utmost difficulty that the maritime
provinces were induced to accept them, and even after
Union was happily passed, there was one last fiery
outburst of the Secessionist spirit in Nova Scotia and
an address to Queen Victoria speaking of 'this free,
happy and hitherto self-governed province ' and praying
that it might not be reduced to ' the degraded condition
of a servile dependency of Canada '.

THE PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION 21

More than a hundred and twenty years have passed
since the framers of the American Constitution sat at
Philadelphia. Steam and electricity have revolutionized
transport, and almost all the economic processes which
affect the material life of man have undergone a complete
transformation. We should therefore naturally expect
that a form of polity designed to meet the needs of the
American Colonies at the end of the eighteenth century
is neither strictly applicable to their modern require-
ments nor capable of being profitably transplanted to
other modern communities. This is in fact the case. The
Constitution of 1789 still rules America, for the amend-
ments have neither been numerous nor, with the one
exception of the abolition of slavery, of the first impor-
tance. Yet if the work had to be done over again
now, it is improbable that any American statesman or
thinker would construct an executive so independent
of the legislature, or a legislature so independent of the
executive, or would assign to the several States of the
Union so large a measure of autonomy as that which
they still enjoy. The members of the Philadelphia
Convention dreaded above all things a powerful and
tyrannical executive. They had been taught that the
enemy of American liberties all through history had
been a monarchy served by a standing army and a venal
parliament, and that it was a government so contrived
which had first enslaved the population of Great Britain
and then attempted to reduce the less docile colonists
of America. To the ordinary American citizen who
lived upon republican platitudes without any close
examination of their relevance, the example of Great
Britain was full of terrible warnings. It illustrated the
vices of tyranny and the dangers of wealth, the ease
with which a popular legislature may be reduced by

22 AMERICAN IDEALS

a too-powerful executive, or a free people may be
coerced by mercenary soldiers. The colonies of New
England had been founded by men who had fled from
the despotism of Charles I, and followed with sympa-
thetic eyes the great struggle for Constitutional freedom
which ended with the fall of the House of Stuart. The
classic names of Hampden and Pym and Cromwell were
as famous on the shores of the Potomac as they were in
the cottages of Bucks or Huntingdon. The classic safe-
guards of English civil and political liberty, the Habeas
Corpus Act, the parliamentary control .over taxation,
were equally cherished on both sides of the ocean.
To many minds the main anxiety as to the future was
the doubtful fate of republican virtues under any large
scheme of polity. Could a republic govern a vast ex-
panse of territory? Could a great state exist without a
strong executive and a standing army ? These anxieties
are printed on every line of the American Constitution.
The picture which the men of the Philadelphia
Convention drew for themselves was that of a com-
munity of simple yet prosperous republics, recruited by
European immigrants of moderate fortunes, protected
by a citizen militia, and distinguished by its immunity
from luxury and want. One speaker maintained that
it was improbable that the number of rich men in
America would ever be greatly increased ; another
asked whether it was conceivable that so vast a country
could be held together'under one polity for a hundred
and fifty years. Madison thought that the new States
of the future would be necessarily agricultural. What
member of the Convention would have dreamt that the
centre of industrial and political power might some day
be removed from the Atlantic seaboard to the unex-
plored wilds beyond the waters of the Mississippi^?

AMERICAN GOVERNMENT 23

Which of those Puritan fathers could divine that he
was providing a political shelter for a Roman Catholic
community of some fourteen millions? Who would
have predicted that a State of the Union, exercising
constitutional powers, might so regulate or forbid the
immigration of alien labour as to compromise the inter-
national relations of the Federal government ? Could' it
be granted to Wilson or Franklin to revisit at the
opening of the twentieth century the great republic,
they would hardly recognize in that restless and poly-
glot society, with its princely fortunes and squalid
slums, its bosses and trusts, its grafts and Tammanies,
its yellow press and its lax divorces, the lineaments of
their Puritan ideal. The danger apprehended at the
present day is just the reverse of the peril which the
fathers of the Constitution were most concerned to
avoid. They lodged the residual power in the separate
States and jealously doled out certain defined functions
to the national government. But the present impres-
sion is not that the Federal authority is likely to be
too strong but that it is certainly too weak. Modern
economic development, placing as it does enormous
power in the hands of individuals or companies, requires
for its control the weight of a strong, pure-handed im-
partial government ; and it is the special weakness of
the American Federation that in a community dis-
tinguished above all others for enormous aggregations
of capital the machinery for giving effect to the ideal
of social justice is less effectual than it is in any other
highly-civilized State.

The Constitutions of Canada, Australia, and South
Africa, while borrowing hints from America, are framed
upon a plan of greater concentration. The men who
were mainly concerned in drafting the British North

24 THE CANADIAN CONSTITUTION

America Act favoured a Constitution upon the British
model. They had no republican distrust of a strong
executive, and in the American Civil War they saw the
dangers to which a federation is exposed. But though
the railways had weakened the mechanical argument
against a legislative union, there was one stubborn block
of obstruction which no civil engineering in the world
could overcome. This was the French Province of
Lower Canada. Whatever scheme of union might be
formed, the French must be guaranteed their religion,
their law, and their language. Had the two white races
been intermingled, as they are in South Africa, or if the
opposition between them had been, as it is in South
Africa, confined to the two points of race and language,
adequate guarantees might have been procured for the
French under a legislative union. As it was, a federation
alone could satisfy differences so wide-ranging and
a geographical position so compact. The French in
Canada would not willingly have entered a legislative
union, but under a federal plan they obtained adequate
assurance that their distinctive nationality would be
preserved. But this concession to centrifugal tendencies
once made, the plan of the Quebec Resolutions and of
the Act founded upon them proceeds upon the hypothesis
that a strong national government is a good and whole-
some thing. The Senate, which represents the federal
principle in the Constitution, is designedly weak. The
legislative powers exclusively assigned to the Parliament
of Canada are wide and numerous. The Governor-
General of Canada in Council appoints the provincial
governors and may exercise a veto upon provincial
legislation, while upon the two important subjects of
agriculture and immigration it is competent to the
Dominion Parliament to make general laws, which in

CANADA AND AMERICA 25

case of conflict override the enactments of the Provinces.
The Constitution was hastily drafted and the partition
of exclusive legislative functions between the Dominion
and the Provinces has been so defined as to give rise
to much ambiguity and litigation. But though the
tendency of legal decisions has been to strengthen the
position of the provincial legislatures, the Government
of the Dominion stands out in sharp contrast to the
Government of the United States. At Ottawa the
Cabinet reflects the opinion of the majority of the popular
assembly and controls the conduct of Parliament. At
Washington the Cabinet is neither named by Congress,
nor a sharer in its deliberations, nor a dictator of its
policy. In Ottawa the Dominion Parliament has wide
powers specifically and exclusively ascribed to it. At
Washington Congress legislates within a comparatively
narrow ambit. Finally, in Canada the residual legislative
power is lodged with the central Parliament, in America
with the several States.

I have heard Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the brilliant patri-
arch of Canadian Liberalism, lecture at Montreal upon the
comparative advantages of the Canadian and American
forms of government. He reminded those of his hearers
who might be tickled by the name and fame of a
republic, that under the Canadian scheme the voice of
the people was more effectually heard and the power of
the central government more effectually exercised. The
fact is that crime is punished in Canada, and that the
Canadian police is the envy of many of the less fortu-
nate States of the American Union.

Mr. Bryce has pointed out that though the reasons
and grounds assigned by the advocates of Australian
federation were more numerous than those urged by
the United States in 1787-9, or in Canada in 1864-6,

D

26 AUSTRALIAN UNION

none of them was so imperative.1 There was no fear of
anarchy or bankruptcy or Civil war. There was no
Constitutional deadlock or apprehension of invasion.
The six Australian colonies might have continued to
enjoy their several existences with no more serious
drawbacks than the presence of internal tariffs and the
absence of uniform provisions upon some matters, such as
the entrance of coloured races, as to which it was desir-
able to enforce a common rule throughout the continent.
Still the six colonies chose to unite. The motives of
those who urged this course were partly sentimental,
partly practical, a compound of national idealism and
reasoned economics. They desired a great and pro-
gressive Australia; but at the same time, since union
was a matter rather of fine sentiment and the balance of
expediency than of sheer political necessity, they were
precluded from drawing the bonds very tightly.

The Commonwealth Government of Australia is
stronger than that of America and weaker than that of
Canada. The unallotted legislative powers rest with the
States, and since the Commonwealth Senate is elected
upon a wide democratic franchise, it is a more powerful
body than its nominated Canadian counterpart. On the
other hand, while the powers exclusively invested in
the Commonwealth Parliament are comparatively few,
the powers which it may wield concurrently with the
States are extremely numerous, and it may well come
to pass that the Commonwealth Government of Australia
may by degrees establish a tradition of legislative
activity so great as to confine the action of the separate
State parliaments within very narrow limits indeed.
The skilled Australian lawyers who drew the Common-
wealth Act infused into it as much elasticity as is com-

1 Studies in History and Jurisprudence, i. 477.

ELASTICITY OF THE CONSTITUTION 27

patible with the nature of a written Federal Constitution.
They realized that the life of a nation is subject to the
law of continual change, and they conceived of a Con-
stitution not as a settled balance of unchanging interests,
but as an organ taking up into its substance the living
and moving forces around it. The sentiment of local
self-sufficiency was strong in 1898, and therefore it was
reverently treated in the Commonwealth Act. But the
framers of the Australian Constitution saw that as the
nation grew older it would attract to itself more and
more of attachment and reverence, and that loyalty to
the Commonwealth would supersede loyalty to the
State. Accordingly they made organic change easy,
and provided politic facilities for the extension of the
central power.

This feeling for greater elasticity and a higher measure
of national as opposed to provincial authority reaches its
climax in the South African Constitution. That part of
the British Dominions which seemed to be least har-
monious has in effect adopted the strictest form of
political union. The parliament of Cape Town is in
fact a sovereign parliament. The restrictions upon its
power contained in the Constitution are for a time only,
and will pass away: and when this happens it will be
for the wisdom of the sovereign body freely to determine
how much or how little of devolution it will permit.

Three concluding reflections. Nobody can study the
history of political unions without feeling on the one hand
how much they have contributed to the peace and civili-
zation of the world, and yet on the other how success
has only been attained by the close study of interests
which to the philosophic observer may seem unimportant
and paltry. Not the least among the grievances of the
Portuguese was that the Spanish king was so infrequent

28 THE GIFTS OF TIME

a visitor to Lisbon, and not the least of the difficulties
which has confronted the Unionists of Australia and
South Africa has been the selection of a capital. It has
more than once happened that negotiations have been
nearly wrecked upon a point which seems curiously
trivial now, but which was the matter of passionate con-
troversy at the time, and that the situation was saved by
a solution entirely unsuited for epical treatment. Such
was that fam'ous ' equivalent ' or lump sum in compensa-
tion for the Scottish revenues allocated to the service of
the debt 'without which', writes Defoe, 'it had been
impossible to bring this Union to a conclusion, nor was
the way ever seen clear towards a Union, till the project
of the equivalent was thought of.' Such too was the
' Braddon clause ' which limited for a period of years
the expenditure of the Commonwealth Government of
Australia. Hard bargains made over temporary but
urgent interests are characteristic of these great collec-
tive acts of statesmanship.

OvSzv /jLtya dvev \povov yevoir' av. Great unions are
the product of Time. The Scottish union was prefaced
by the conjunction of the crowns in 1603 and by the
recognition of the Presbyterian Church as the estab-
lished Church of the Kingdom in 1690. The story
of the American Union is not comprised in four
months of secret conclave in Philadelphia, but extends
from the formation of the Continental Congress in 1774
till the passing of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869.
Germany was united in two, Italy in four stages, super-
vening upon a long period of historical preparation.
In the British Empire the process has been easier and
quicker, and the reputations earned by unionist statesmen
are deservedly less than those which history accords to
Bismarck and Cavour. Yet so long as racial antagonism

UNION LITERATURE 29

remains the framework of political parties, union is never
complete or comfortable. The cleft is very deep in
Canada, for it goes down to all the roots of life, and it is
given to the Irish alone, sharing as they do the religion
of the French and the language and culture of the
British, to cross and recross from side to side. In South
Africa, as the contrariety of creed and temperament is
less, so the position of the two white races in a land
overwhelmingly populated by blacks supplies a perma-
nent ground for common action which is wanting to
the Canadians. Yet if the true Union tarries, this will
not be contrary to the lessons of history, nor need it
cause us to feel despair.

The publication of the minutes of the South African
Convention brings to a close a series of historical
records, so instructive and important that, with the
single exception of the Acts of the first assembly of
revolutionary France, there is no body of modern poli-
tical literature to compare with it. It opens with the
notes and journals of the constitutional discussions at
Philadelphia and comprises those ampler volumes of
debate which illustrate the origins of the three great
unions of our oversea dominions. Advisedly we may
call these documents unique, and affirm that no other
race can show a similar record of the grandest problems
of political architecture settled by a process of temperate
discussion. It is not the most romantic or impressive
way of achieving national unity. The way of Garibaldi
was more romantic, the way of Bismarck was more
impressive, but it is the only way for democracies inured
in the traditions of self-government and freedom. In
these fundamental records of Anglo-Saxon political life
the reader will, from time to time, come across indications
of that noblest type of political oratory, which springs

30 ANGLO-SAXON UNIONS

from a generous imagination when it is filled with the
grave and appealing image of national destiny. But «it is
not primarily for demonstrations of eloquence that we
should recur to these records. There was never— and
for this there is no call for ingratitude — in any constitu-
tional convention of the Anglo-Saxon race a galaxy of
orators who could vie with the great parliamentarians
of the July monarchy or with that fiery band of southern
advocates who drove revolutionary France into war.
The constitutions of which we speak were hammered
out by ordinary men and in an atmosphere of mixed
and blended motive, only partially clarified by the rays
of a larger patriotism. In these debates we may trace
the play of doubts and fears, of clashing interests and
varying sentiments, of occasional strokes of political
genius, such as the invention of the Federal Senate,
mixed with time-serving expedients and the promptings
of a narrow and jealous particularism. Historical ex-
perience frequently invoked and narrowly assessed, as
by the Americans with their Lycians and Achaeans, their
Scots and their Switzers, was never allowed to over-
power the driving needs of the moment. History was
treated as a servant, not as a master. Each nation took
what it wanted from the past and made the new experi-
ments which were adjusted to its particular state. We
have borrowed from the Americans, but never so closely
as did the Swiss Commission of 1848. We tolerate
anomalies shocking to the geometrical mind. The
British State is Anglican south of the Tweed, Pres-
byterian north of it. The Kaffir is a political animal in
Cape Town, a living tool in Johannesburg. Learned
doctors of the Catholic Church have expressed dismay
that a nation so intelligent should exhibit upon the grave
matters of the Faith so lax a principle, so faint a

OUR ANOMALIES 31

courage. More heroic were it to lose the Netherlands
with Alva than to gain Scotland with Somers. We
will not discuss the thesis. It is sufficient to remark
that the Constitutions of the great Anglo-Saxon
Unions do present many gross marks of compromise,
and that they are full of shocking anomalies, — the
anomalies which belong to a race logical only in its
pursuit of freedom.

OXFORD : HORACE HART
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

OF 25 CENTS

OVERDUE.

____ •—